The Ignored Reality Of California ‘Teacher’ Who Discharged Firearm In Class

I’m not a tinfoil hat kind of guy, but if I were, I’d be freaking out about how we start talking about arming teachers and suddenly there are teachers discharging weapons in class. Luckily, I’m not. I also understand that these incidents are happening in states where teachers aren’t permitted to carry on school property as a general rule, such as the teacher in Georgia recently.

More recently, however, a teacher in California discharged a weapon in class. The bullet supposedly fragmented and one fragment hit a student.

A teacher at a California high school who accidentally fired his gun during a class, reportedly injuring three students, was not authorized to have a gun at school, officials said.

Dennis Alexander, a teacher at Seaside High School and reserve officer with the Sand City Police Department, was teaching an “Administration of Justice” class Tuesday when he reportedly pointed his firearm at the ceiling during a lesson and accidentally shot it.

Police told The Associated Press that Alexander had pointed his gun at the ceiling to make sure it was not loaded when the weapon discharged.

The Monterey Peninsula Unified School District said that Alexander was not authorized to have a firearm at the school because he’s not a school resource officer. Authorities were investigating why Alexander had the gun and if officials were aware he intended to bring it to school.

The school district told Fox News in a statement that an immediate investigation “determined that there was no immediate threat to students or staff,” however one student’s mother told the AP that her son suffered moderate injuries.

Look at that second paragraph, where I’ve bolded three little words.

That’s right. The teacher in question is a reserve police officer. The people having conniptions over the idea of teachers carrying guns generally have no issue with armed police officers, yet here we have someone who is a police officer pulling a stunt like this.

While the school district said Alexander wasn’t authorized to have a firearm at the school, that was a matter of policy, not law. Even under California’s strict gun laws, police officers are expressly permitted to carry a firearm in California schools.

Yet the media glosses this over. They continue to refer to him simply as a teacher. In fairness, that was his primary function. However, he was also a police officer, the group of people who are supposedly immune to this kind of thing.

So what’s the takeaway?

For one, an isolated incident like what supposedly happened in Georgia shouldn’t be taken as proof teachers can’t be trusted with firearms. We have years and years of evidence that this doesn’t happen regularly from states like Utah, Texas, and Oklahoma, among others where firearms might be carried and no one really knows about it. We don’t hear about teachers having negligent discharges in these areas. We don’t hear about teachers gunning down problem students either.

But you know what else we tend not to hear about from these places? Mass shootings.